268: Democracy vs. Communism
February 18, 2019
About a month ago I came across a clutch of these great old anti-communist pamphlets at Book Thug Nation. Touted as the “Democracy versus Communism Series,” they are an amazing…
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Judging Books by Their Covers
Judging Books by Their Covers is Josh MacPhee's ongoing series of writings and image collections of book covers. Although sometimes they feel marginal today, books have been a primary form of information and cultural exchange for almost 400 years. Book covers are often a person's first contact with the ideas inside, and in the hustle and bustle of contemporary life, cover designs are even more likely to shape the opinions of those that pick them up since many of us are too busy to ever read the entirety of the books. Judging Books by Their Covers largely focuses on—but is not exclusive to—the book covers and design coming out of the Left.
Josh is always looking for more book covers to feature. If you've got some gems he missed, or have ideas, drop him an email at josh (at) justseeds.org 
267: Penguin Science Fiction
February 11, 2019
I’ve been on hiatus from this book blog for about six months, but I’m going to try to start posting new entries again, although time will likely only allow one…
266: The New Soldier
August 13, 2018
I was surprised to stumble on this really nicely designed book by and about the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, published in 1971 by Collier, a major publishing house. It’s…
265: Health and Safety in Printmaking
July 23, 2018
I found this amazing Canadian manual for printmaker safety earlier this year. The design is by Karen Patkau, and wonderfully captures the kind of overlap I find so visually enjoyable…
264: African Writers Series in Lapham’s Quarterly
July 18, 2018
I excited that I’ve just had a piece I wrote on the social and design histories of Heinemann’s African Writers Series published on the Lapham’s Quarterly website. I’m planning on…
263: Big Red Diary 1974
July 16, 2018
From the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, young radicals in the U.S. really only had one choice for a day planner, the Slingshot Organizer. I always had a love/hate relationship…
262: Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles
July 9, 2018
I’ve long been a fan of German photomontagist John Heartfield. His political montage work for publications like AIZ is often reproduced, and has been collected in a number of editions,…
261: A Soviet Journey
July 2, 2018
I picked up this book in Portland, OR a couple years back. I’ve been an Alex La Guma fan since reading his slow-burning yet mesmerizing anti-apartheid struggle novel, In the…
260: No Pasaran!
June 25, 2018
I picked up this book while browsing Mother Foucault’s Bookshop in Portland, OR with Alec and Katie a couple years back. It was a little pricey for something I’ll never…
259: John Reed’s Mexiko in Aufruhr
June 18, 2018
In order to not wait months between posts, I’m going to just share some individual books I’ve picked up over the last couple years that are extraordinary in some way….
258: Leonard Baskin (compiled)
June 4, 2018
Three of the most significant social realist printmakers working in the US in the second half of the 20th Century were Leonard Baskin, Antonio Frasconi, and Ben Shahn. While all…
257: Dover Science and Math
May 21, 2018
While there is a fair amount of literature out there on the “paperback revolution” and the sea change in publications created by the Pocket Books imprint in the US (founded…
257.5: Book Table at Moon Palace Books
April 9, 2018
I recently was invited by the rad Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis to decorate one of the tables they’ve set up in their new cafe and restaurant over-looking the bookstore….
257: Penguin Crime
March 12, 2018
There are a couple really sweet spots (for me) where book cover design starts to feel sublime, and one of these is the “Green Period” of the Penguin crime series…
256.5: Ursula, Rest in Power!
February 1, 2018
For those that haven’t heard, Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most important Anglophone authors of the 20th century, passed away on January 22, 2018. I (and many here…
256: Little New World (compiled)
January 22, 2018
From the early 20th century through the early 1960s, one of the largest Left organizations in the US (if not the largest) was the Communist Party USA. The propaganda wing…
255: Tamil Communism
January 15, 2018
I’ve been sitting on these dozen covers for almost six years now. Back in 2012 my friend Jesse sent these scans from a visit to India, and it…
254: Pathfinder Pamphlets
January 8, 2018
Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s it was difficult to be a young radical in the U.S. and not come across “The Pathfinder Tendancy,” a international group of Trotskyists…
253: Willeford’s Miami
December 11, 2017
The TV show Miami Vice ran from 1984–1990, closing out the decade with a slick, fashionable, multi-racial crime fighting duo that got to play it both ways—creating a sexy, alluring…
252: Penguin Specials
December 4, 2017
The Penguin Special ran for about fifty years, from 1937 through 1989 (although the latest date I’ve seen on one is 1986). Specials covers were red, one of army of…
251: Fontana Africa (compiled)
June 26, 2017
While hunting for books in the Heinemann African Writers Series (by far the most expansive collection of writing from Africa in English, with interestingly designed covers to boot!) I began…
250: Dutch Mass Markets
May 1, 2017
A couple months ago I stumbled onto twenty Dutch mass market paperbacks scattered across the $.50 and $1 racks at the Strand here in New York. Although I can’t read…
249: The Wisdom Library
April 17, 2017
While working a shift at Book Thug Nation a couple years back, I stumbled across a couple really nicely designed hardbacks of Sartre’s philosophy. They’re interesting because they simultaneously have…
248: Czech Crime
February 27, 2017
Three or four years ago I was supposed to go to a big book sales with my friends that run Book Thug Nation here in Brooklyn, but I ended up…
247: Simenon, part III
January 2, 2017
This week is the final installment of covers of novels by the extremely prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon. When it comes to Simenon hardbacks, I’m partial to the 60s/70s…
246: Simenon, part II
December 26, 2016
This week, more Simenon! Although rather than focusing in on the author himself, this is a perfect opportunity to dig into one of my favorite moments of paperback cover…
245: Simenon, part I
December 12, 2016
Following last post’s foray into genre fiction, I’ve now hopped from sci-fi to crime. I’m a huge fan of detective novels and crime fiction, and in some might say that…
244: Philip K. Dick
November 28, 2016
I used to work hard at doing one of these Judging Books by Their Covers posts a week, but I’ve fallen of, and recently realized I’ve been doing more like…
243: 50 Fists
October 3, 2016
This week is a bit of a divergence from my usual book cover fare. Instead of focusing on a publisher, author, or designer, I want to look at likely the…
242: Mbari Publishing
September 12, 2016
For years I’ve been hunting down issues of Black Orpheus (which I featured in my last post, #241), and books from it’s spin-off publishing-wing Mbari. I honestly can’t remember how…
241: Black Orpheus
August 29, 2016
Black Orpheus: A Journal of African and Afro-American Literature is likely the most important literary journal to emerge out of Africa, and one of the most important in the world…
240: Collier’s Af/Am Library
July 4, 2016
While collecting books from the African Writers Series published by Heinemann (I’ll be featuring those books in a future post), I stumbled upon what I first thought was a small…
239: Ravan Books
June 27, 2016
This week’s focus is on the South African published house Ravan Press, which was founded in 1972 by Peter Randall, Danie van Zyl, and Beyers Naudé. On second glance, you’ll…
238: “Power, Fists, Guns, Books: Black Power & Book Cover Design”
June 13, 2016
For months I’ve been working on a complete rewrite of the post I originally did here about the design of the book Black Power, and other related Civil Rights-era publications…
237: Updates
June 6, 2016
This week I don’t have a new focus. Instead I’ve gone back into a number of old posts and corrected mistakes, improved the writing, added new covers, and/or added better…
236: Editorial Pueblo y Educación
May 16, 2016
This week we find ourselves a decent distance from Ben Shahn. We’re looking at Cuba, actually, and in particular a really beautiful set of saddle-stitched publications put out by Editorial…
235: Ben Shahn, part IV
May 9, 2016
Welcome, finally, to the last installment on the book covers of Ben Shahn. Although this is the post I’m the least invested in, somehow it’s the one that has taken…
234: Ben Shahn, part III
April 11, 2016
This week is the third installment of my Judging Books by Their Covers posts on the design work of Ben Shahn. For more on Shahn, and to see the other…
233: Ben Shahn, part II
March 28, 2016
Welcome to the second week of my Ben Shahn book cover posts. You can check out week one, my stroll through the covers Shahn designed in the 1950s and 60s…
232: Ben Shahn, part I
March 21, 2016
Ben Shahn is one of the artists most influential to many members of Justseeds. He was a Lithuanian immigrant who apprenticed as a lithographer before becoming a master of multiple…
231: Insurgency 1971
February 29, 2016
Last month I got to give a talk at the Maine College of Art in Portland, which was great in and of itself, and had the added bonus of giving…
230: Small Press Africa, part VI
February 22, 2016
This week I’m going to close out my sub-series on Small Press Africa with sixteen books from Southern Africa. I hope people have enjoyed checking these books out as much…
229: Small Press Africa, part V
February 15, 2016
This week we’re still in East Africa, with a focus on the dual publishers East African Literature Bureau and Kenya Literature Bureau. In an interesting turn, the Kenya Literature Bureau…
228: Small Press Africa, part IV
February 8, 2016
The undisputed center of publishing in East Africa is Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Kenya is home to the majority of the regions presses, and was a key center for…
227: Small Press Africa, part III
January 11, 2016
This week is a continuation of my series on African small press books (see HERE and HERE for the earlier installs), with a focus in on one Nigerian volume. The…
226: Small Press Africa, part II
January 4, 2016
Last install (here) I shared five covers from books published by small African presses. Turns out my collection is a little bigger than I thought, with way more books than…
225: Small Press Africa, part I
December 21, 2015
One of the things I’ve always got an eye out for are books published on small presses in Africa. It’s shocking how little about Africa makes into mainstream U.S. consciousness…
224: Diane & Leo Dillon
December 7, 2015
Much of what I focus on in these Judging Books blog posts is cover design that is quite rare, either because the politics are marginal (anarchism! communism! socialism! oh my!),…
223: Power and Revolution
November 30, 2015
Found this rare and fascinating little paperback on a book adventure Monica and I went on for my birthday last year. Tahsin Abdul Hai’s Power and Revolution: From the Impetus…
222: Pluto Crime
November 16, 2015
You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the books I’m usually discussing here, but a solid half or more of my reading intake is genre fiction, sci-fi and especially crime novels….
221: The Iron Heel
November 9, 2015
Welcome to the second installment in my sub-series of book covers from early utopian/distopian novels. Back in March of 2014 I took a look at the covers of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s…
220: Buchi Emecheta
November 2, 2015
For this week’s post I thought we could stay in Africa, but focus on an author instead of a publisher. Or maybe a combination of the two. One of the…
219: Éditions CLE
October 26, 2015
First, welcome to my new Judging Books by Their Covers blog channel on Justseeds.org! I’m really excited to relaunch the series on our new site, which not only looks 200%…
218: This—is Grenada
June 8, 2015
No in-depth analysis this week, but a peek at one really cool book, inside and out. Frances Kay’s This—is Grenada is a beautiful self-published travel book from 1966. After skimming…
217: A Little Bit o’ Lenin
June 1, 2015
First off, we’ve been hard at work on a brand new Justseeds website, which will vastly transform the experience of both the posting and reading of blog entries like these….
216: Artia Pocket Books
April 27, 2015
Back in 2012 I slide an eye-catching spine off the shelf at a bookstore in Boston and. It was an edition of Arnošt Lustig’s Diamonds in the Night I had…
215: AK Press
March 29, 2015
Today I veer off from my regularly scheduled posting. 2015 is the 25 year anniversary of AK Press, one of the longest (maybe the longest?) running anarchist presses in the…
214: 1980s SWP Pamphlets
March 16, 2015
In November, while touring London with comrades from Interference Archive, we stopped at Bookmarks, a nice-sized bookshop run by the Socialist Workers Party (which is a sister organization to the…
213: Latin America Mass Markets
February 23, 2015
This past weekend was the big annual church book sale in my neighborhood, and I found some great books, including a mini-collection of mass market paperbacks from the 1960s about…
212: Spro-Cas
February 9, 2015
Back to Africa this week. I’ve got a massive backlog of African publishers I want to cover, but tracking down information about them is often difficult, as most no longer…
211: Little New World, part II
February 2, 2015
This week I’m going to go through the second half of Little New World Paperbacks, roughly in order of their issue number. The last number I’ve found is LNW-39, although…
210: Little New World, part I
January 26, 2015
From the early 20th century through the early 1960s, one of the largest Left organizations in the US (if not the largest) was the Communist Party USA. The propaganda…
209: Images of a Revolution
January 12, 2015
One of my favorite art books is Images of a Revolution, a oversized if slim volume on the murals of revolutionary Mozambique. It was published in 1983 by the Zimbabwe…
208: Zimbabwe Publishing House
January 5, 2015
As many of you know, I’m a big collector of African paperbacks (and ones about Africa), and I’ve been slowing featuring different presses here on the blog. Past features include:…
207: Anvil Press
December 29, 2014
Over the last couple years I’ve been finding old political mass market books about Ireland, and squirreling them away. Then I realized they’re actually all published by the same press,…
206: Benia Krik
December 15, 2014
A quick week, only one cover today. I recently found this amazing copy of Isaac Babel’s play Benia Krik. The design is attributed to “Lloyd,” the book published by Collet’s…
205: Americanist Library
December 8, 2014
This week we swing from left to far right, Africa to Belmont, Massachusetts. Sorry for the whiplash. The Americanist Library is a collection of almost twenty mass market paperbacks put…
204: Three Crowns Africa
December 1, 2014
There were three major British publishers which began putting out books by African authors in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially to the educational book market. The big two…
203: Leonard Baskin, part II
November 24, 2014
The second half of Leonard Baskin’s book cover output I’ve found is composed of facial portraits. The portrait of Kafka to the right is exceptional. The picture feels like it…
202: Leonard Baskin, part I
November 17, 2014
In my mind, three of the most significant social realist printmakers that were working in the US in the second half of the 20th Century were Leonard Baskin, Antonio Frasconi,…
201: Ronald Clyne
November 10, 2014
Ronald Clyne is best known as the brilliant designer of most of the Folkways label record covers, over 500 from the 1950s through the early 1980s (for more on that,…
200: Two Hundred!!!
November 3, 2014
The first “Judging Books by Their Covers” post was on April 12, 2010. Four and half years and over 2,000 book covers later, I’ve reached the two hundred post mark….
199: stage 1
October 27, 2014
In honor of my upcoming trip to London, I thought I’d do a feature on a little known lefty publisher from the UK. For awhile now I’ve been running into…
198: New Century Publishers, part III
October 20, 2014
Back in 2011 I published a couple posts looking at the covers of New Century Publishers, a Communist Party-run press that published from the 1940s into the 1960s, and appears…
197: Ghana Publishing House
October 13, 2014
For the past decade I’ve slowly been collecting all kinds of paperbacks published about and within Africa. Last year at the Haunted Bookshop in Iowa City I ran across a…
196: ESP
October 6, 2014
A brief break from the longer entries, I wanted to share this amazing cover from Susy Smith’s ESP (Pyramid Books, 1962). I can mostly let it speak for itself, but…
195: Ramparts Press
September 29, 2014
I’m going to try to be a little less complete-ist than I’ve been in the past, hopefully making these posts a bit easier to compile. To that end, this is…
194: Scanlan’s
September 22, 2014
Scanlan’s Monthly was a New Left political/counter-cultural magazine that ran for eight issues and less than a year, March 1970 to January 1971. It was co-founded and co-edited by Warren…
193: Curbstone Press, part V
September 15, 2014
For the first four weeks of looking at the output of Curbstone Press, I broke the books into semi-distinct categories: Roque Dalton and Curbstone’s origins, Claribel Alegría and other Latin…
192: Curbstone Press, part IV
September 8, 2014
Sometime in the late 1970s the editors at Curbstone must have crossed paths with a figure involved in political culture in Denmark. A series of poetry chapbooks by Danish authors…
191: Curbstone Press, part III
September 1, 2014
In 1981, Curbstone Press began publishing a series of small pamphlets of critical non-fiction writing by international practitioners of political art. This series, entitled Art on the Line, ran for…
190: Curbstone Press, part II
August 25, 2014
Curbstone was not just an independent poetry press, but it’s core mission was political, to publish and bring awareness to culture as a tool of struggle in Latin America. One…
189: Curbstone Press, part I
August 18, 2014
I was in a used bookshop in Denver in 1995 and I was looking in the poetry section for some reason. I have no memory as to why, I had…
188: Foreign Languages Press, part III
August 11, 2014
Here’s my final entry in the Foreign Languages Press series (not that there aren’t plenty more books put out by FLP—thousands, actually). You can see the other posts HERE. I…
187: Foreign Languages Press, part II
August 4, 2014
One of the main things that Foreign Languages Press books have in common is covers that attempt to meld the pastoral (peasants and peasant society) with the industrial (and technological),…
186: Foreign Languages Press, part I
July 28, 2014
Founded in 1952, three years after the Communist Revolution, Foreign Languages Press is one of the external propaganda arms of the Chinese Communist Party. They supposedly have published over 30,000…
185: Two from the Philippines
July 21, 2014
Over the past year I stumbled upon these two handsome books from the Philippines. Although they were published by different companies almost fifteen years apart, they both share a really…
184: The Hobo
July 14, 2014
I found this great book on a dollar rack here in New York City. It’s a 1961 edition (Phoenix Books, a division of the University of Chicago Press) of…
183: The Conflict Between Capital & Labor
July 7, 2014
This week I present to you this “Fair, Candid, and Impartial Treatment of the Subject [of the conflict between Capital and Labor] from a Non-partisan and Christian Standpoint”!! E.T. Russell’s…
182: The Golden Fleece
June 30, 2014
I’ve got a lot of longer-format book cover series in the works for the blog, but they are taking much longer than the one-week chunks I have been trying to…
181: Modern Arabic Writing, part II
June 16, 2014
Back in November 2013 I did a post on the cover designs of the American University in Cairo’s Modern Arabic Writing series circa 1990s (you can see it HERE). I…
180: Dover Science, part III
June 2, 2014
This week’s covers are from Dover Math books I’ve found over the past six months at Book Thug Nation bookstore. You can see the last two posts about Dover books…
179: Dover Science, part II
May 26, 2014
I keep running into more and more cool covers on Dover books about science and math (and some art…) from the 1950s/60s. I first looked at these almost a year…
178: Quebecois Authors
May 12, 2014
While I was in Québec City two weeks ago I found some nice examples of book covers from Québécois authors. I know very little about the Québec book trade, but…
177: Abstract Science Fiction
May 5, 2014
Finding the Science Fiction Book Club covers (see last week’s post HERE) got me thinking about abstraction as a representation of Sci Fi, and I started digging around for other…
176: Science Fiction Book Club
April 28, 2014
I recently stumbled upon a small handsome science fiction hardback at a used book sale. The cover of Wilson Tucker’s The Lincoln Hunters is entirely abstract, but still manages to…
175: Zamyatin’s We, part II
March 31, 2014
This week back to Zamyatin’s We, and a look at all the non-English editions. (You can check out all the English-language covers HERE.) When first written, the book was not…
174: Zamyatin’s We, part I
March 24, 2014
I’m slightly embarrassed that I only read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s (Eugene Zamiatin) We for the first time about two months ago. Not embarrassed because it’s something everyone should read, but embarrassed…
173: Cambridge Africa
February 24, 2014
Just a quick look today at a couple of 1960s academic history books about Africa. I found these on the cheap at the great West Philly bookstore A House…
172: Amilcar Cabral, part III
February 3, 2014
Although much respected, Amilcar Cabral didn’t actually write that much beyond speeches and lectures. But there is a large body of literature about Cabral, and the struggle in Portuguese Guinea….
171: Amilcar Cabral, part II
January 27, 2014
Last week I looked at the covers of books by African revolutionary and theorist Amilcar Cabral that were in English. This week lets take a peek at his books published…
170: Amilcar Cabral, part I
January 20, 2014
I was introduced to Amilcar Cabral when I was in college. His name popped up along with other African and Caribbean revolutionaries I was reading like Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney,…
169: Seven Seas, part VI
January 13, 2014
Continuing with my cleaning up and filling in the gaps in old posts, here’s nine more covers from the East German, English-language publisher Seven Seas. You can check out the…
168: Collier’s Af/Am Library, part IV
January 6, 2014
I had originally hoped that once I posted a series of covers here on the blog, I’d be able to move on to new book explorations. But that’s not the…
167: Pluto Workers’ Handbooks
December 30, 2013
Back in 1974, someone smart at the British radical, socialist press Pluto decided to publish the first of a series of Workers’ Handbooks. The Hazards of Work: How to Fight…
166: Short Stories from Puerto Rico
December 16, 2013
Here is another gem unearthed at Brooklyn’s best bookstore, Book Thug Nation. The title is a bit contested, as the cover says it’s Short Stories from Puerto Rico, and the…
165: The Wood Grouse
December 9, 2013
This week I’ve got another quirky book to share, but we’ll be jumping from East Germany to Laos. I found this small, cheaply produced book—The Wood Grouse—in Portland, OR. It…
164: DDR Mini Poster Books, part III
December 2, 2013
This week is the final in a series of posts about mini-East German poster books (see HERE and HERE). This week’s book, Plakate zum Ersten Mai (Posters for May Day)…
163: DDR Mini Poster Books, part II
November 25, 2013
This weeks book is the second in a series of mini-poster publication produced in the DDR, or former East Germany. Last week we looked at a book about posters celebrating…
162: DDR Mini Poster Books, part I
November 18, 2013
When I first traveled to Berlin back in 2007, doing research for Signal with Alec Dunn, we spent a lot of time haunting bookstores. Being a book junkie, there’s little…
161: The Labor Spy Racket
November 11, 2013
Over the past two years I’ve been stumbling across old, early paperbacks published in the 1930s by Modern Age Books in New York. They seem like a lefty publisher in…
160: Modern Arabic Writing, part I
November 4, 2013
In the late 2000s, in the basement of the Caliban Bookshop in Pittsburgh, I found a handsome paperback edition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. It was the first…
159: Bogle L’Ouverture, part II
October 28, 2013
After Walter Rodney and Andrew Salkey, the most important author Bogle-L’Overture published was the Jamaican-born but London-based street poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. Kwesi Johnson become a popular voice of the…
158: Bogle L’Ouverture, part I
October 21, 2013
I first encountered Bogle-L’Overture Publications almost twenty years ago. Outside of Boston their is a strange bookstore called the New England Mobile Bookfair. Neither mobile nor a book fair, it…
157: Gorey, Part III
September 30, 2013
For this final week of Edward Gorey covers, I’ve pulled together all the stragglers I could find, covers he did that are later or not for Doubleday Anchor. The Rilke…
156: Gorey, Part II
September 23, 2013
Last week I looked at a chunk of Anchor Doubleday paperbacks from the 1950s and 60s with covers by Edward Gorey. You can see them and read it HERE. Last…
155: Gorey, Part I
September 16, 2013
One of the great things about working at a bookstore is you start to notice more and more quirky little things about books, stuff that only the week before passed…
154: Studies in International Communism
September 9, 2013
I was in San Francisco in the Spring of 2012 for the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and since I had a little extra time I made the rounds of the…
153: Seed
September 2, 2013
152: On The Poverty of Student Life
August 26, 2013
While rooting around Interference Archive looking for student movement books over the past couple weeks, I pulled out a whole set of different editions of what might be the most…
151: Students on the Move, Part II
August 19, 2013
Last week I looked at the phenomena of 1960s and 70s mass-market paperback publishers trying to cash in on interest in the giant student movement in the United States at…
150: Students on the Move, Part I
August 12, 2013
The last handful of years have seen an explosion in student organizing, here in the States, but also across the world, with hot spots in the UK, Austria, Sudan, and…
149: Arabic Spines
July 22, 2013
While in Palestine I visited over a dozen libraries and archives, and got to take a look at an entire world of books that was previously unknown to me. One…
148: Penguin Early African Fiction
July 8, 2013
When I was tracking down all the books in the Penguin African Library (see HERE), I came across an old novel based in South Africa that Penguin published, W.H. Canaway’s…
147: Dover Science, Part I
July 1, 2013
As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes work at my friends’ bookshop here in Brooklyn called Book Thug Nation. It’s a great place, and there are many, many nuggets of book…
146: Fontana Africa, Part III
June 24, 2013
Here’s the third and final week of covers from the Fontana African Fiction series. I’ve given a bunch of back story and context for these covers in the previous two…
145: Fontana Africa, Part II
June 17, 2013
This week is a continuation of the covers from the Fontana African Fiction series. You can look at last weeks post and introduction to the books and their design HERE….
144: Fontana Africa, part 1
June 10, 2013
While hunting for books in the Heinemann African Writers Series (by far the most expansive collection of writing from Africa in English, and interestingly designed covers to boot!) I began…
143: The Charred Witness
June 3, 2013
So in order to keep abreast of my book hoarding, I work one day a week at one of the best bookstores in New York City, Book Thug Nation. Recently…
142: Seven Seas Books, Part V
May 27, 2013
So I found a couple last Seven Seas books, including two of the Africa-related ones I had been looking for. This will be the final installment of the Seven Seas…
141: Seven Seas Books, Part IV
May 20, 2013
For this fourth look into the book covers of Seven Seas, I’m going to just run through the rest of the titles I’ve been able to find. (To see the…
140: Seven Seas Books, Part III
May 13, 2013
For this third entry into the books put out by East German publisher Seven Seas in the 1960s and 70s, I want to look in-depth at a single title. By…
139: Seven Seas Books, Part II
May 6, 2013
Seven Seas also published a number titles related to Africa, in particular novels and short stories by South African writers. I’ve been able to find four of these titles, but…
138: Seven Seas Books, Part I
April 29, 2013
I was over my friend Aaron’s house nine months ago or so, and stumbled upon a book on his shelf published by Seven Seas Books. The spine was clean and…
137: The Not So Distant Future
March 4, 2013
Are you worried about global warming? Don’t fret, because in twelve short years you’ll have much bigger problems to deal with: The scum of the earth will have taken over…
136: Collier’s Af/Am Library, Part III
February 18, 2013
This week is the third and final installment of covers from Collier’s African/American Library series. What we’ve got left are the books by African-Americans, and unlike the African novels, most…
135: Collier’s Af/Am Library, Part II
February 11, 2013
I love mass market paperbacks. They are small, fit in your pocket, and were usually printed cheaply and in such volume that they hold little monetary value these days. Most…
134: Collier’s Af/Am Library, Part I
January 21, 2013
While collecting books from the African Writers Series published by Heinemann (I’ll be featuring those books in a future post), I stumbled upon a small series of African novels produced…
133: Tricontinental Press, Part II
January 14, 2013
I guess did this a little backwards. I focused on the later published books last week, and now here is Puerto Rico: Analysis of a Plebiscite, as far as I…
132: Tricontinental Press, part I
January 7, 2013
As I’ve written about elsewhere, my Celebrate People’s History poster series is in part inspired by the down-and-dirty poster printing of 1960s and 70s Third World liberation movements. In many…
131: Pilot Bails Out
December 31, 2012
About a month ago my friend Cindy and I went to go see the jaw-dropping remake of Red Dawn (and that’s an entirely different story—wow, what an amazingly delusional Tea…
130: Anarchy (2nd Series), part VII
December 24, 2012
This week is the last installment of covers from the second series of Anarchy magazine from London, which ran for 38 issues from 1971 to 1985 (see the previous entries…
129: Anarchy (2nd Series), part VI
December 17, 2012
Welcome back to part six of my focus on the second series of the UK magazine Anarchy. Last week we looked at a series of covers done largely by anarchist…
128: Anarchy (2nd Series), part V
December 10, 2012
This week we’ve got some great covers! To the right is Anarchy #21. I actually should have included this issue—and the next one, #22—with last weeks entry, as it fits…
127: Anarchy (2nd Series), part IV
December 3, 2012
With issue 15 Anarchy goes through another facelift. For this, and the next three issues, we’ve got a straight sans serif masthead in white on a fading, dark to light,…
126: Anarchy (2nd Series), part III
November 26, 2012
With issue #10, Anarchy comes into it’s own, settling into a fixed masthead and confident enough to continue to eschew the traditional anarchist red and black and experiment with deep…
125: Anarchy (2nd Series), part II
November 19, 2012
Welcome back to part two of our tour through the second series of the UK Anarchy magazine. Click HERE to see last week’s entry. Let’s pick up where we left…
124: Anarchy (2nd Series), Part I
November 12, 2012
In Signal:01, Alec Dunn and I ran an interview with Rufus Segar, the graphic designer who did the vast majority of the covers for the British monthly journal Anarchy. Not…
123: Up From Slavery
November 5, 2012
On my recent trip to whirlwind tour of the Midwest (or at least Chicago, Grand Rapids, and Milwaukee) I’ve been hitting up all the used bookstores I can find, looking…
122: The Burden of Choice
October 8, 2012
Here’s another great find from the foreign language table at a regional bookfair, this one in Poughkeepsie, NY. I was immediately attracted to the book because of the nicely embossed…
121: Three Czech Books
October 1, 2012
In early Summer I went with friends from Book Thug Nation to a regional book sale in Pennsylvania. The sale was awesome, thousands and thousands of books packed into a…
120: Penguin African Library, part X
September 24, 2012
For the final installment of book covers from the Penguin African Library (see the first nine posts HERE), I’m going to take a look at the other books on Africa…
119: Penguin African Library, part IX
September 17, 2012
This is the 9th part of my series on the covers of the Penguin African Library and associated titles, and the second part on the covers of series editor Ronald…
118: Penguin African Library, part VIII
September 10, 2012
I had been collecting the Penguin African Library books for awhile when I stumbled upon this copy of Into Exile at the local, and very cool, Brooklyn used book shop…
117: Penguin African Library, part VII
September 3, 2012
The Penguin African Library (see HERE for earlier cover posts) was the brain child of Ronald Segal, a Jewish South African who grew to despise the Apartheid system and organize…
116: Penguin African Library, part VI
August 27, 2012
So over the past five weeks I’ve gone through the entire Penguin African Library (PAL), proper, but there is so much more to look at! There was actually a predecessor…
115: Penguin African Library, part V
August 20, 2012
Welcome to the fifth week of covers from the Penguin African Library (PAL). If you find yourself a bit lost trying to follow some of this, it might make sense…
114: Penguin African Library, part IV
August 13, 2012
I guess will start this week off with one of the darker—in content and color—covers for the Penguin African Library. Reginald H. Green and Ann Seidman’s Unity of Poverty: The…
113: Penguin African Library, part III
August 6, 2012
This week we’ll pick up with the fifteenth title in the Penguin African Library (PAL), Peter Mansfield’s Nasser’s Egypt (AP16: 1965). With this book the separation of the three sections…
112: Penguin African Library, part II
July 30, 2012
This week I’m going to continue working through the covers of the Penguin African Library, started last week HERE. Once again, one of the things I find so compelling about…
111: Penguin African Library, part I
July 23, 2012
In 1962, British paperback publisher Penguin launched a new book series, the Penguin African Library (PAL). Along with the Heinemann African Writers Series, it is one of the most ambitious…
110: Frantz Fanon, part X
July 16, 2012
Here is the final post in this long-running Fanon series. Thanks to all that have been with me for the entire ride! You can see all the covers (133 different…
109: Frantz Fanon, part IX
July 9, 2012
Let’s start off the second installment of Fanon biographies with Jock McColloch’s Black Soul, White Artifact (Cambridge University, 1983), which takes the African mask metaphor further than any of the…
108: Frantz Fanon, part VIII
July 2, 2012
This week I’m going to dig into the biographies and books about Frantz Fanon. I’m going to start with three of the most popular biographies: Irene L. Gendzier’s Fanon: A…
107: Frantz Fanon, part VII
June 25, 2012
Now that I’ve gone through all the Fanon titles proper, here is a collection of strange odds and ends, books that contain Fanon’s writing, but aren’t standard editions. To start…
106: Frantz Fanon, part VI
June 18, 2012
Toward the African Revolution was first published in 1964, after Fanon’s death. It is a broad collection of his short essays, many written while he was traveling across Africa as…
105: Frantz Fanon, part V
May 28, 2012
The second book written by Fanon was A Dying Colonialism. The book was originally published in 1959 by Maspero in France as Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, then later…
104: Frantz Fanon, part IV
May 21, 2012
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was initially published in 1952 by Editions Du Seuil. I’ve been digging around and have yet to find a cover for that first edition,…
103: Frantz Fanon, part III
May 14, 2012
If Wretched of the Earth is Fanon’s manual for anti-colonial revolt, Black Skin, White Masks is the intellectual backbone behind it. Originally published in 1952, and based on his rejected…
102: Frantz Fanon, part II
April 2, 2012
Let’s start off part two of the covers of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (read part one HERE) with this beautiful cover from the 1961 Portuguese edition published by Editora…
101: Frantz Fanon, part I
March 26, 2012
I can’t quite remember exactly when and where I was first introduced to Frantz Fanon. I do remember pulling down the pocket paperback to the right (Grove Press, 1968) off…
100: B. Traven, part X
March 12, 2012
What better way to celebrate 100 posts about book covers than another batch of B. Traven designs! Here’s part ten of my features on Traven, this time adding 34 more…
99: Hammers & Sickles, part I
March 5, 2012
One of the most compelling political symbols of the 20th century is the hammer and sickle. Although it was created during the Russian Revolution, and became the official symbol of…
98: Black Power
February 27, 2012
Working on the Angela Davis covers has got me thinking about representations of Black liberation. In particular, I’ve been trying to sort out and understand the surprisingly successful cover to…
97: Angela Davis, part III
February 13, 2012
Here’s the last hurrah of the Angela Davis covers (pending any great ones y’all might send in to me!), a collection of books by other authors about Davis and her…
96: Angela Davis, part II
February 6, 2012
Onward to the Angela Davis pamphlets! Because these have been produced by a diverse collection of publishers and activist groups, the design is much broader and more interesting than the…
95: Angela Davis, part I
January 30, 2012
While working on my posts about the covers of books about prisons (JBbTC 39–45, 52), I started a folder of Angela Davis covers, which has now grown large enough to…
94: Penguin Political Leaders
January 23, 2012
I’ve never hidden my admiration for the sheer volume of creativity, thoughtful illustration, and sharp design that has gone into the production of Penguin Books, especially from the 1950s through…
93: Kronstadt, part IV
January 16, 2012
My friend R. Marut in London has come through again with some more books I had missed, so here are the last three Kronstadt covers. First is this handsome Freedom…
92: Kronstadt, part III
January 9, 2012
This week I’ve got even more Kronstadt covers, with a lot of help from Dave at Recollection Books in Seattle (thanks!). To the right is the dust jacket of the…
91: Kronstadt, part II
January 1, 2012
I wanted to start this week off with a counterpoint to last weeks generally pro-Kronstadt sailor covers. To the left is the cover of Kronstadt by Lenin and Trotsky, published…
90: Kronstadt, part I
December 26, 2011
This week’s post is inspired by the book to the right, which I came across on Alec’s bookshelf during a recent visit to Pittsburgh. Emanuel Pollack’s The Kronstadt Rebellion (New…
89: Cienfuegos Press, part VI
December 19, 2011
Some of you might have noticed I’ve shorted the name of these posts to JBbTC, but I’ve also re-sorted and organized them, as well as titled them by content, so…
88: Updates
December 12, 2011
Every once in awhile I need to catch my breath from doing these covers, and that’s a good moment to go back and fill in any missing pieces and odds…
87: Boni Paper Books, part III
December 5, 2011
OK, I couldn’t help myself. Even though I went through the eight Boni Paper Books I actually have over the past two weeks (HERE and HERE), I started getting so…
86: Boni Paper Books, Part II
November 28, 2011
Here is part two of my series on the early American paperback experiment known as Boni Paper Book. To read the back story, and see the first four books I…
85: Boni Paper Books, part I
November 21, 2011
Two weekends ago I got a chance to take a short trip to Pittsburgh to get a much needed mini-vacation and visit with fellow Justseeds’ members Bec, Icky, Mary, and…
84: The Man Who Was Thursday, part II
November 14, 2011
Here is part two of the covers of G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 anarchist exploitation novel The Man Who Was Thursday. You can see the first 17 covers from last week HERE….
83: The Man Who Was Thursday, part I
November 7, 2011
A couple months ago I was looking around a great local Brooklyn new/used bookshop, Unnameable, and I stumbled on a book cover featuring an cool looking illustration of a riot…
82: Sha’un Falastiniya
October 31, 2011
About a month ago I started getting emails from my friend Charles, who works for the Journal of Palestine Studies. He started digging up old issues of an Arabic language…
81: Fizz
October 24, 2011
This week I’m going to jump back to Germany in the 60s and 70s, and look at Fizz, an antiauthoritarian political paper which split with Agit 883. Editors from Agit…
80: New Anarchist Review
October 17, 2011
About three years back I bought a small collection of cheap, but relatively handsome, UK Anarchist pamphlets under the title New Anarchist Review. They stretched from 1984 into the early…
79: Agit 883, part V
October 10, 2011
Here’s the last batch of Agit883 covers! These all rely on some version of collage and montage, to varying effects…I’m actually up to my neck in a poster project for…
78: Agit 883, part IV
October 3, 2011
This week we’ve got more Agit 883. Like last week, I’m blitzed with other work and life issues, so I’m mostly going to just let these ride, and speak for…
77: Agit 883, part III
September 26, 2011
Here’s week three of covers of the German anti-capitalist paper Agit 883. This week I want to look at the covers that use the conventions of popular comic books to…
76: Agit 883, part II
September 19, 2011
Here’s week two of covers from the German 60s/70s publication Agit 883. Last week (HERE) I looked at the covers of the first 13 (of 88) issues, and broke the…
75: Agit 883, part I
September 12, 2011
Continuing and expanding on last week’s post on the covers of Sabat, an ’80s German ultra-left magazine, this week I’m going to go way to the late 60s, and look…
74: Sabot: Hamburger Info Sammlung
September 5, 2011
I think I’ll keep exploring the covers of obscure ultra-left political journals for awhile! Although not exactly known for their graphic sensibilities, there are definitely some interesting looking antiauthoritarian political…
73: The Ripening of Time
August 29, 2011
I’m trying to decide what feature this week while riding out this hurricane hitting the east coast. Hopefully I’ll get this up and posted before the power goes out (if…
72: B. Traven, part IX
August 22, 2011
My friend “Ret” has sent me some great covers a couple times now. Originally a couple of B. Traven ones, and now a lot more (plus some Angela Davis covers…
71: Ukranian Modernism, part III
August 15, 2011
This week will be the final round-up of the Ukranian covers I’ve been looking at for the past couple weeks. If you’re interested and haven’t seen them, you can check…
70: Ukranian Modernism, part II
August 8, 2011
Here’s the second part of the Ukranian communist book stash I found in upstate NY. (Part one can be found HERE.) To the left is the cover for a book…
69: Ukranian Modernism, part I
August 1, 2011
A couple months back I got to spend an amazingly fun and relaxing weekend at a strange old Ukranian summer camp in Monroe, NY called Arrow Park. It was the…
68: The Black Jacobins
July 25, 2011
I recently got the word from PM Press that I’m designing two covers for reprints of C.L.R. James books. It’s quite an honor, as James is one of those interesting…
67: Updates (Eberhardt and New Century Publishers)
July 18, 2011
For the next week I’m in Pittsburgh helping Justseeds install our piece in the upcoming Pittburgh Biennial, so unfortunately I don’t have a ton of time for the next couple…
66: New Century Publishers
July 11, 2011
A couple months back I was browsing the shelves at the awesome Book Thug Nation bookstore in Brooklyn and I came across a nice paperback copy of Julius Fuchik’s Spanish…
65: Mozambique Revolution
July 4, 2011
I’m very excited to have a new studio, which will also be the home of Interference Archive, but between packing, moving, building shelving, and regular freelance work, I haven’t had…
64: Insurrection
June 27, 2011
I had intended to follow-up last weeks post about Elephant Editions Anarchist Pocketbook series (check it out HERE) with the covers of another of their popular book/pamphlet series, the eight…
63: Elephant Editions, part I
June 20, 2011
Dove-tailing off of last weeks post on the UK publisher Shortfuse, this week I’m going to start a series of posts on the UK/Italian anarchist publisher Elephant Editions. I believe…
62: Shortfuse Press
June 13, 2011
In January 1994 I made my first visit to the UK and to London. At the time there were two functional anarchist spaces in town that were open to the…
61: Eberhardt Press, part III
June 6, 2011
This week I’m looking at the final bits and pieces from Eberhardt Press. I’ve got a couple book and pamphlet covers here, and some things Eberhardt printed but didn’t design….
60: Eberhardt Press, part II
May 30, 2011
Welcome to part two of my series focused on the Portland, OR printer and publisher Eberhardt Press. Over the past 7 years Eberhardt has developed a series of signature stylistic…
59: Eberhardt Press, part I
May 23, 2011
After looking at one of the anarchist presses with the best cover design of the 1970s and 80s, I wanted to look ahead and see who is doing something comparable…
58: Cienfuegos Press, part V
May 16, 2011
Here’s the second half of the remaining Cienfuegos Press covers. The image to the left is the cover of Towards a Citizens Militia. It seems so audacious now (and maybe…
57: Cienfuegos Press, part IV
May 9, 2011
OK, now turning the corner on the follow-up posts and into new material, this week I’m going to look at the covers of the British anarchist publisher Cienfuegos Press, which…
56: B. Traven, part VIII
May 2, 2011
Here’s the last of the B. Traven covers. This week I’ve rounded-up 33 covers, so I’m going to forgo much of my witty banter and pretty much just dump all…
55: B. Traven, part VII
April 25, 2011
By far the most response to this book cover blog over the past year was to the six-week installment about the covers of the mysterious German-born, Mexican-bound, antiauthoritarian novelist B….
54: Victor Serge, part I
April 18, 2011
So I’ve got all these Cienfuegos Press and B. Traven covers to follow-up on last year’s posts, but I haven’t had the time to pull them all together. Instead, for…
53: New World Paperbacks, part III
April 11, 2011
Following up on last weeks post, and some of last years covers that slipped through the cracks, here is a cool selection of New World Paperbacks (NWP) covers. The original…
52: Prisons, part VIII (George Jackson)
April 4, 2011
Well, I have to say, I’m pretty excited that I’ve now done a full year’s worth of “Judging Books by Their Covers” blog posts! Week 52! In what has otherwise…
51: Arbeiter Ring’s Semaphore series
March 28, 2011
After filling the last three months with two different five-week series (prisons and Kropotkin), I’m ready to jump into something completely different. For the most part over the past year…
50: Kropotkin, part V
March 21, 2011
Here’s the final installment of the Peter Kropotkin book cover series, 19 covers this week, 69 total over the five week series. Although what initially drew me to doing these…
49: Kropotkin, part IV
March 14, 2011
Over the next couple weeks I’m going to dig through the rest of the Peter Kropotkin covers I’ve found. Most are beardless, and many are banal at best, but there…
48: Kropotkin, part III
March 7, 2011
No more beards, but this week I’ve found cool old-school Kropotkin covers, 19th Century to early 20th. The one above is a great Czech modernist cover for Anarchist Morality, designed…
47: Kropotkin, part II
February 28, 2011
Here is the next batch of Kropotkin beard covers. Like I mentioned last week, most covers of books by classic anarchist protagonists seem to focus on portraits, but since most…
46: Kropotkin, part I
February 21, 2011
Given the last 2 months of book covers relating to prisons, I thought it would be nice to take a little break and go off on some tangents. To start,…
45: Prisons, part VII (Mumia)
February 14, 2011
So moving on, this is the final entry of the posts covering the covers of prison books. I’ve missed a lot along the way, and maybe I’ll do a follow-up…
44: Prisons, part VI (George Jackson)
February 7, 2011
In many ways the quintessential political prisoner of the 60s was George Jackson. At age 18 he was caught robbing a gas station, and sentenced to an indeterminate period of…
43: Prisons, part V
January 31, 2011
Now I’m going to move into the next sub-collection of prison book covers, books about political prisoners in the U.S. Officially the U.S. does not acknowledge that it holds political…
42: Prisons part IV
January 24, 2011
About 3 or 4 years after I first got involved in the then-tiny prison activist movement, the movement began quickly growing on college campuses, and a new round of activist,…
41: Prisons, part III
January 17, 2011
The real game changing book for prison studies was Michael Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Interestingly, the covers of the book in English, from the first hardback to the current paperback,…
40: Prisons, part II
January 10, 2011
I first became sensitized to the problems within the U.S. prison system in the early 1990s. A friend brought me to an event in Washington, DC about the political prisoner…
39: Prisons, part I
January 3, 2011
For the next month of so I’m going to focus on the covers of books about U.S. prisons. Something uplifting for the new year! I first became involved in prison-related…
38: Medu Art Ensemble Newsletter
December 27, 2010
In 1978, just across the border from South Africa in Gabarone, a group of exiled South Africans formed the Medu Art Ensemble. Medu became an armed cultural wing of the…
37: Homage to Catalonia, part II
December 20, 2010
Orwell was lucky to be published in the UK by Penguin, one of the publishers with the best record of concern for, and investment, in their book covers. The cover…
36: Homage to Catalonia, part I
December 13, 2010
The book to the left is the copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia that I grew up with (I think I first read it early on in high school)….
35: John Heartfield, part VI
December 6, 2010
For the final John Heartfield cover installment, I’ve collected a smattering of covers he’s done for a bunch of different publishers. Like I said at the beginning, I think his…
34: John Heartfield, part V
November 29, 2010
This week we’ll look at some John Heartfield designed covers he did for publishers other than Malik-Verlag. The covers here are from two other Berlin publishing houses: Verlag für Literatur…
33: John Heartfield, part IV
November 22, 2010
Part four of the Heartfield covers, part two of the Upton Sinclair ones. Now we’re up to 1928, in which Malik Verlag published three separate Upton Sinclair books: Die…
32: John Heartfield, part III
November 15, 2010
One of the main authors Malik-Verlag published was Upton Sinclair, and Heartfield designed ALL of Sinclair’s covers. This week will do part one of Sinclair, next week the rest. Let’s…
31: John Heartfield, part II
November 8, 2010
Here’s the next batch of Heartsfield’s Malik-Verlag covers. The one to the right is a favorite, Franz Carl Weiskopf’s Umsteigen ins 21. Jahrhundert: Episoden von einer Reise durch die Sowjetunion….
30: John Heartfield, part I
November 1, 2010
Sometime in the early 1990s I was introduced to the photomontages of John Heartfield. The stark black and white collage work meshed well with my punk aesthetic tastes at the…
29: Spanish Civil War Publications
October 25, 2010
A couple years back I was checking out a Robert Capa exhibition at the International Center for Photography in NYC and they had a small backroom with an auxiliary exhibition…
28: Futurist Books, part II
October 18, 2010
Here’s part two of the Futurist books. Marinetti’s books in particular get more violent and aggressive in this period, with references to bombs, words exploding across the page, etc. There…
27: Futurist Books, part I
October 11, 2010
Now lets take a quick stop over in Italy. When I was in Rome a couple years back for an exhibition (at the excellent House of Love and Dissent), I…
26: Action
October 4, 2010
Let’s stay in France this week, and check out the covers of Action, the newspaper developed by the Comités d’ Action during May 68. The first Comités were developed as…
25: Roman Cieslewicz, Part III
September 27, 2010
Here’s the final installment (for now), on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. In 1968 Cieslewicz was invited to design the cover style for a new line of philosophy,…
24: Roman Cieslewicz, part II
September 20, 2010
Part two on Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Before leaving for Paris, Cieslewicz was the art director for the Polish cultural magazine Ty i Ja (You and I)….
23: Roman Cieslewicz, Part I
September 13, 2010
Let’s take a quick break from US publications and skip over to Europe. A couple years back I discovered the Polish poster artist and designer Roman Cieslewicz. Although well known…
22: Radical America
September 6, 2010
Here’s another installment of covers of a periodical, this time Radical America, which began as an organ of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1967, and then ran into…
21: The Drama Review
August 30, 2010
Back at the end of June I was in Toronto, strangely at an academic performance art conference to talk about the Spectres of Liberty project, and their was a table…
20: Westerns
August 23, 2010
Now for a slight break from the usual program. When I was out in Wisconsin a couple years back for a wedding we stumbled upon a small town library book…
19: B. Traven, part VI
August 16, 2010
Ahh, the final installment of the covers of Mr. Berick Traven, or Ret Marut, or Otto Feige, or Hal Croves? No one has yet been able to fully pin down…
18: B. Traven, part V
August 9, 2010
For part 5 of the B. Traven covers, I’m going to focus on a number of his lesser known novels (He wrote five or six outside of the Treasure of…
17: B. Traven, part IV
August 2, 2010
Recapping last week: In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart)…
16: B. Traven, part III
July 26, 2010
In the decade from 1931 to 1940, B. Traven published a series of six books known as his Jungle Novels: Government (1931), The Carreta (aka The Cart) (1931), March to…
15: B. Traven, part II
July 19, 2010
Next up in the B. Traven book cover-athon is The Death Ship. My favorite Traven novel (well, maybe a tie with The Rebellion of the Hanged), The Death Ship is…
14: B. Traven, part I
July 12, 2010
This week we take a trip a little bit beyond the limits of my friends’ and my book collections. This is the first in a series of posts collecting the…
13: New World Paperbacks, Part II
July 5, 2010
Here’s part two of the New World Paperbacks series. I’ve only got a dozen different books on my shelf, but if anyone else out there has some more cool NWP…
12: New World Paperbacks, part I
June 28, 2010
The next couple weeks entries will be focused on the covers of New World Paperbacks, which was an imprint of the Communist Party, USA’s main publishing house International Publishers. I…
11: Dea Trier Mørch’s Den Indre By
June 21, 2010
This week I’m just going to focus on one book, and actually open the cover! For years I’ve been giving various versions of a talk and slideshow about political printmaking,…
10: Portuguese Modernism
June 14, 2010
I found this nice little collection of Portuguese modernist book covers in a friends academic office. They are from the 30s-60s. They designs are all hand painted, with the type…
9: Anarchist Books from Norway
June 7, 2010
A quick-y this week, here are three covers of Norwegian-published anarchist titles I found in the shelves at my friend Bergsveinn’s house in Bergen. The Kropotkin book is hilarious, with…
8: Cienfuegos Press, Part III
May 31, 2010
Here’s the last installment of the Cienfuegos/Costantini covers. Bits and pieces. This Tifft cover is one of the best in my opinion, the graphic is crisp and commanding, and the…
7: Cienfuegos Press, Part II
May 24, 2010
Here’s the second installment of Flavio Costantini covers for Cienfuegos Press. The five this week are a series of covers he did, each designed with the letter A (for Anarchy)…
6: Cienfuegos Press, Part I
May 17, 2010
For years I’ve been a fan of the look and feel of the Cienfuegos Press books published by Stuart Christie in the UK in the late 1970s-early 1980s. I stumbled…
5: Hebrew Modernism
May 10, 2010
Here’s a nice clutch of book covers from Hebrew volumes. Even though I took Hebrew school for a couple years, I mostly read comic books, so I have no idea…
4: Liberation Support Movement, Part III
May 3, 2010
Part 3 (and final part for now) of the covers of the Liberation Support Movement. This Sowing the First Harvest cover is quite nice, a striking block print (attributed to…
3: Liberation Support Movement, Part II
April 26, 2010
Part two of the covers from the LSM Information Network, some of these are less graphically powerful than last weeks, but there are still a couple gems. I particularly…
2: Liberation Support Movement, Part I
April 19, 2010
This week I want to share part one of a collection of book and pamphlet covers from the Liberation Support Movement (LSM), an organization that primarily did solidarity work with…
1: Novosti Press Agency
April 12, 2010
I’ve been really digging designing book covers of late, which has made me look much closer at all the other covers I come across and already have on my shelf….